Is Your Resume Working for You?

Are you using your resume to your full advantage?

Potential employers may not give your resume very much time at all to make a positive impact on your behalf. You may be competing against many, many others. Your resume needs to work for you quickly, and get you to the next stage of the process – usually the interview stage, so you have a chance to make more of an impact, in person.

Put yourself in the employers shoes. What would you want to see? Do you want to see a long list of hobbies or little things that the applicant did 20 years ago? No, you want to see what relevant work experience and skills the applicant has that could be valuable in their particular workplace.

Katie Robertson-Kelk from ECM Consulting sees many different resumes in her job as a professional resume writer. She says it is important to be specific in your resume and let your personality shine through. Add a hyperlink to your LinkedIn profile (if you have one) and ensure your resume is modern, easy to read and not complicated unnecessarily by lots of different fonts and spacing.

And if you are sending the same resume to lots of different employers then you should reconsider. Your resume may need a little tweaking for each job to ensure you refer to the most relevant experience, qualifications and skills for each job. Read the job description again, and try to understand what is particularly important to this employer and decide how best to emphasise what you have that they want.

And get someone with attention to detail to check it over for you. Spelling and grammatical errors send the wrong message.

Do you need help with your resume? It may be worth talking to a professional resume writer to esnure you are on the right track. Katie Robertson-Kelk is a Toowoomba local and may be able to help – contact her via her website ECM Consulting.